Ambassadorial level. Mochtar made it clear that those attending the Conference would need to be armed with power to commit their governments over pledges in respect of contributions to the Processing Centre and in respect of specific annual or monthly admissions of refugees from the Processing Centre. I will revert to this point at the end of this letter.
8. Mochtar's visit to Washington seemed to have paid handsome dividends. He saw Mr Vance with Senator Clark (the Chairman of the Congressional Committee on Acceptance of Refugees) in attendance. Al though the US still hankered after a much bigger all-purpose refugee centre, they fully supported the concept of the ASEAN Processing Centre and would contribute toward its implementation. As from 22 March, the US had increased its intake of Indo-China refugees to 84,000 a year. The US Government would provide half the total cost of the Indo-China refugee problem we cross-examined Mochtar on the word "total". He stuck to it and said he presumed this covered all Indo-China refugee problems. Legislation in the US is also pending which is particularly geared to the admission of refugees outside the terms of the 1914 Immigration Law. All told, Mochtar thought that the US Government was a good deal more bullish than UNHCR over the ASEAN Processing Centre and certainly agreed on the real need for it.
9. It remains for me to seek instruction as to what line I should take when Mochtar's Conference is convened in Jakarta in mid-May. The exclusion of Hong Kong from this scheme leaves us with the possible bilateral liability of relieving the colony of any further boatloads that arrive there. I am afraid we find Snoxell's letter of 30 March lacking in conviction; de Haan left a pretty poor impression when he visited Jakarta and provoked contemptuous comments from my US colleague who talked to him about the understandings he claimed to have reached with the Vietnamese. I would not, therefore, like to suggest that Hong Kong will be spared any future problems or that UNHCR will necessarily accept full liability as
and when they arise. That being so, I don't think
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/Mochtar
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